Which side of the boundary? Plans and projects

I am operating a new arrangement this time, with different purses for work and private life. Bus to a meeting – work. Bus to buy food for family dinner – personal. Lunch with Rachel as we make our way round town – work. Quiet sit down in a café with a cold drink to do my email – personal.

Some activities, though, are harder to classify. I woke on Tuesday wondering what designing a church garden (described in my previous posting) has to do with my primary focus on growing food, conserving the soil, and understanding the benefits of eating lots of vegetables. Part of the answer is in the second meaning of 'Growing together': strengthening community by working cooperatively. Rachel and I have been working this week on a proposal for her and Solange – who shared the Batwa work with me last time – to go back to the last of those communities and encourage mutual support for vegetable growing; we hope the cycle of selling allocated land for a pittance then remaining destitute can be broken. I have also been writing up Rachel's report on her new work with orphans in the Friends Church in Byumba, funded with money raised by the children and young people in my Quaker Meeting in London: that's an example of two distant communities growing together by the fortunate supporting the less fortunate.

To return to making the church garden: it's about improving physical and emotional health, developing community, enjoying and cherishing our portion of our world. In this Evangelical Friends Church context, it requires children and the adults who teach them to see caring for the environment as doing God's will. From my perspective, in this my final year, it's also about leaving a place that can remain green and pleasant long after the sack gardens have disintegrated.
This spiny hedging plant, seen in a nursery on the edge of Kigali, could be used to block off an unsightly track once the main path has been mended.

I was talking this morning with Jonas, the head of the Friends Peace House school for vulnerable teenagers, Mwana Nshuti (Child my friend), where we made a compost heap and planted several sacks with green vegetables three years ago. Please will I come back, he asks, because the current students have seen no sign of the work I did then. And please will I bring seeds of that special sort of cabbage? He means perpetual spinach. I tell him that, unlike real cabbage, that plant produces viable seed in this country, so next time he can save some. I have enough words in Kinyarwanda to know he then spoke to the class about how they could learn to eat more variety and improve their health. So that was work.

And why was I talking to him this morning? He was translating my words from my limited French and struggling to grasp the strange concepts I needed to communicate to the teacher of sewing, Samuel, who is also part of a tailoring cooperative in Kicukiro, behind the market. I had two requests: a source of rags for lining baskets to make insulating cookers – work, since using more variety of ingredients is easier for women if they don't have to stir the beans for three hours every day to stop them burning on the wood fire or charcoal; then offcuts from African patterned fabrics to take home for my granddaughter, who uses scraps in collages for her fine art course – personal.
This insulating cooker (aka haybox or peacemaker) is on display at the Sowarthe Tea Factory, whose owner, Calley Alles, has a continuing interest in fuel efficient cooking.